Sunday, May 6, 2012

"How to Spot the Future"

From Wired:

Thirty years ago, when John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends,
his prescient vision of America’s future, he used a simple yet powerful
tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the
newspaper. He didn’t just read it, though. He took out a ruler and
measured it. The more column inches a particular topic earned over time,
the more likely it represented an emerging trend. “The collective news
hole,” Naisbitt wrote, “becomes a mechanical representation of society
sorting out its priorities”—and he used that mechanism to predict the
information society, globalism, decentralization, and the rise of
networks.

As clever as Naisbitt’s method was, it would never work today.
There’s an infinite amount of ink and pixels spilled on most any topic.
These days, spotting the future requires a different set of tools.
That’s why at Wired, where we constantly endeavor to pinpoint
the inventions and trends that will define the future, we have developed
our own set of rules. They allow us to size up ideas and separate the
truly world-changing from the merely interesting. After 20 years of
watching how technology creates a bold and better tomorrow, we have seen
some common themes emerge, patterns that have fostered the most
profound innovations of our age.

This may sound like a paradox. Surely technology always promises
something radically new, wholly unexpected, and unlike anything anybody
has seen before. But in fact even when a product or service breaks new
ground, it’s usually following a familiar trajectory. After all, the
factors governing thermodynamics, economics, and human interaction don’t
change that much. And they provide an intellectual platform that has
allowed technology to succeed on a massive scale, to organize, to
accelerate, to connect.

So how do we spot the future—and how might you? The seven rules that
follow are not a bad place to start. They are the principles that
underlie many of our contemporary innovations. Odds are that any story
in our pages, any idea we deem potentially transformative, any trend we
think has legs, draws on one or more of these core principles. They have
played a major part in creating the world we see today. And they’ll be
the forces behind the world we’ll be living in tomorrow.1. Look for cross-pollinators.
It’s no secret that the best ideas—the ones with the most impact and
longevity—are transferable; an innovation in one industry can be
exported to transform another. But even more resonant are those ideas
that are cross-disciplinary not just in their application but in their
origin.

This notion goes way back. When the mathematician John von Neumann
applied mathematics to human strategy, he created game theory—and when
he crossed physics and engineering, he helped hatch both the Manhattan
Project and computer science. His contemporary Buckminster Fuller drew
freely from engineering, economics, and biology to tackle problems in
transportation, architecture, and urban design.
Sometimes the cross-pollination is potent enough to create entirely
new disciplines. This is what happened when Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky started to fuse psychology and economics in the 1970s. They were
trying to understand why people didn’t behave rationally, despite the
assumption by economists that they would do so. It was a question that
economists had failed to answer for decades, but by cross-breeding
economics with their own training as psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky
were able to shed light on what motivates people. The field they
created—behavioral economics—is still growing today, informing
everything from US economic policy to the produce displays at Whole
Foods.

More recently, the commonalities between biology and digital
technology—code is code, after all—have inspired a new generation to
reach across specialties and create a range of new cross-bred
disciplines: bioinformatics, computational genomics, synthetic biology,
systems biology. All these fields view biology as a technology that can
be manipulated and industrialized. As Rob Carlson, founder of Biodesic
and a pioneer in this arena, puts it, “The technology we use to
manipulate biological systems is now experiencing the same rapid
improvement that has produced today’s computers, cars, and airplanes.”
These similarities and common toolsets can accelerate the pace of
innovation.

The same goes for old industries, as well. The vitality we see in
today’s car industry resulted from the recognition that auto
manufacturing isn’t a singular industry siloed in Detroit. In the past
decade, car companies have gone from occasionally dispatching
ambassadors to Silicon Valley to opening lab space there—and eagerly
incorporating ideas from information technology and robotics into their
products. When Ford CEO Alan Mulally talks about cars as the “all-time
mobile application,” he’s not speaking figuratively—he’s trying to
reframe the identity of his company and the industry. That’s testimony
to a wave of cross-pollination that will blur the line between personal
electronics and automobiles.

The point here is that by drawing on threads from several areas,
interdisciplinary pioneers can weave together a stronger, more robust
notion that exceeds the bounds of any one field. (One caveat: Real
cross-pollination is literal, not metaphorical. Be wary of flimflam
futurists who spin analogies and draw equivalences without actually
identifying common structures and complementary systems).

2. Surf the exponentials.
Some trends are so constant, they verge on cliché. Just mentioning
Moore’s law can cause eyes to roll, but that overfamiliarity doesn’t
make Gordon Moore’s 1965 insight—that chips will steadily, exponentially
get smaller, cheaper, faster—any less remarkable. Not only has it been
the engine of the information age, it has also given us good reason to
believe in our capacity to invent our future, not just submit to it.
After all, Moore’s law doesn’t know which silicon innovation will take
us to the next level. It just says that if the previous 50 years are any
indication, something will come along. And so far, it always has....MUCH MORE